Portland, Ore., — Service to 76,000 Portland General Electric customers has been safely restored following historic high winds that impacted the region on Monday and Tuesday, causing an unprecedented number of individual outages affecting PGE customers. PGE has dispatched 48 crews and hundreds of PGE and contract line workers and other support personnel to continue working on power restoration for the remaining 79,000 customers who are not affected by the proactive public safety outage put into place for the safety of people and property in a limited high-risk area near Mt. Hood. Due to the high number of individual outages, repairs are intensive and may be more time-consuming as crews go street-by-street to make connections. PGE appreciates the patience of customers who have been without power and those waiting for their service to be restored. Crews are working as quickly as safety allows and 24-hour restoration efforts will continue as high winds allow until all power to customers can safely be restored. Given ongoing wind gusts within the public safety power shutoff area, PGE expects to initiate assessment of the damage starting today. We anticipate power in this limited area may be out through the weekend, although the extent of damage to the system may impact that timeline. PGE is receiving unconfirmed reports that some fires in the region may have been started by electrical equipment affected by heavy winds and debris. Safety is our top concern. At this time, we are working alongside community leaders and emergency responders to fully assess each situation and outage to understand the circumstances. We are not planning additional preemptive public safety power outages at this time. However, as we do in all extreme weather and wildfire situations, we are working closely with emergency officials and fire districts and may turn off power in limited areas or to individual structures as they request. Customers should report downed lines immediately to PGE by calling 503-464-7777 or 800-544-1795.
Customers who are within the area of the preemptive public safety power outage, along Highway 26 from Brightwood to Government Camp, can visit portlandgeneral.com/wildfire for updates about service restoration. Customers who are outside of that affected area and are without power can visit portlandgeneral.com/outage for intermittent updates on estimated restoration times. Given the high volume of outages, these estimates may fluctuate and change as outage circumstances become clearer.